Sweet Dreams

Whether or Not the Trumps Keep Them, Separate Bedrooms Are the Ultimate Status Symbol

While the first couple vehemently denied reports that they sleep apart from one another, in their social set, separate bedrooms are just another way to prove you’ve got money and square footage to burn.

By Peter Kramer (Trump Tower), by Larry Marano (Donald and Melania), both from Getty Images.

In glittering Miami Beach, the ultra-modern house of entrepreneur Eric Borukhin and his wife, Mira, boasts two master suites—one tailored to each of their personalities. For this endeavor, they enlisted Choeff Levy Fischman, whose signature tropical-modern style has graced the homes of Cher and Matt Damon, and interior designer Charlotte Dunagan. The result is striking, almost a photographic negative: hers is all beiges and creams, with black-out windows and built-in speakers for her music collection. His is an elegant combination of darkness, grey, and white, with coastal UV rays streaming through the glass and a TV for his late-night sports cravings.

“It’s a matter of convenience, if you can afford it,” Eric Borukhin says. “If you can have that extra room, it’s basically a luxury.”

Within their social circle, Borukhin says, “everybody accepts it as a normal thing.” In the popular imagination, though, separate bedrooms have long been stereotyped as the omen of a doomed marriage. Most recently, celebrity magazines like Us Weekly have pounced on claims that Donald and Melania Trump have separate bedrooms in their New York apartment as fuel for rumors of relationship woes. (A rep for Melania Trump denied the claims to US Weekly last month.)

But sleeping in separate bedrooms is neither rare nor necessarily a symptom of marital strife. In 2015, the National Sleep Foundation reported one in four couples do it. In interviews with Vanity Fair, luxury real estate and design leaders very roughly estimated that around 10 percent of their elite clientele go for dual master bedrooms. Throughout history, couples have slept apart for many reasons, ranging from incompatible sleep patterns to warring tastes in decor. And for the upper class, it’s always been a status symbol.

Decorator James Stuart Duncan, whose eponymous firm has clients across Miami, New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto, says such couples tend to be older, with high social status, and live in spacious, non-metropolitan locales with older houses designed for individual bedrooms. He says “it’s a very ‘old money’ kind of thing” and wishes it were more common.

Among the self-made nouveau riche young and old, though, it's "extremely trendy," according to Choeff Levy Fischman's Paul Fischman. The trend began five years ago, he says, and has since been normalized into a status symbol: “They know exactly how they live, they’ve got it down to a science, and if this is something that fits their lifestyle, they’re absolutely going to do it.”

Left, the master bedroom of Eric Borukhin and his wife Mira on Hibiscus Island; Right, the Hibiscus Island home’s second master suite.

Courtesy of Choeff Levy Fischman.

In Manhattan, the high cost of living and lack of space make it an especially salient status marker, says Wednesday Martin, whose 2015 memoir, Primates of Park Avenue, made waves for its depiction of a secret Upper East Side of “glam stay-at-home moms,” weaponized Birkin bags, and “wife bonuses.” “You also have to live in a state of ideological release,” she says. “You have to be wealthy enough to buy your way out of this idea that married couples sleep together.”

But even for those who can afford it, the taboo against sleeping separately persists, Martin says, so it remains “inside information” kept private within circles of close girlfriends. “This is information you might share to say, ‘Are we similar? Can we both afford separate bedrooms? Do we both live in big townhouses on the Upper East Side, do we have the luxury of this?’ Sometimes it can be a way of saying, ‘Are you a little bit alienated from your spouse?’”

This tension manifests especially when the Park Avenue set talks about the Trumps’ rumored arrangement, which plays mostly as a marker of cultural and generational difference and estrangement. (Martin insists that it is an “open secret” within circles she spent time with.) They defend their own separate bedrooms with reasons like kids and schedules.

It’s a taboo that psychologist and model Anjhula Mya Singh Bais and her husband, Satish Selvanathan, scion of Carson Cumberbatch PLC and a turnaround private-equity specialist, want to push against. All of their homes—one each in New York, Mumbai, Kuala Lumpur, Colombo, and Rajasthan—are equipped with separate bedrooms to fit their different schedules, workloads, and hobbies, and their relationship is no less intimate for it.

“A lot of people become disappointed in relationships . . . because after years, your love takes on a different hue,” Bais says from their Norman Foster-designed home in Kuala Lumpur. “There’s a lot of people that are in love with the idea of love, and hormonally and otherwise, it settles down into a beautiful, different type of intimacy. In fact, once that clichéd romance goes, that’s when it really begins.”

The stigma appears to be a recent, middle-class, American development. Historically, separate bedrooms were beautiful-people-only. “It was the rare individual beneath the aristocracy who slept alone,” says A. Roger Ekirch, a history professor at Virginia Tech who wrote At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. From the 15th to at least the 19th century, only the gentry could afford separate bedrooms, while peasants bedded down with entire families and even livestock.

As privacy became the vogue in the 18th century, Ekirch says, separate bedrooms became more common among the “upper crust of the upper crust.” And as late as the 20th century, it was de rigueur among British blue bloods like Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth, and aristocrat and writer Christopher Sykes and his wife, Camilla. So says the Sykes’ journalist grandson, Tom, who runs The Daily Beast’s British royalty blog "The Royalist" and wrote about the pair’s posh living arrangement.

“Christopher and Camilla were very much in love,” says Sykes. “There was a certain amount of corridor creeping that made their sex life perhaps more interesting . . . They were able to preserve some of the allure and mystique, because they wouldn’t have seen each other changing and farting in the morning.”

Although the practice has died out with modern upper-class attempts to assimilate, Sykes says, middle-class couples have begun adopting separate bedrooms, albeit for practical reasons, not status. But the American bourgeoisie is a different story.

“We came out of the WWII era into this intense era of not only togetherness . . . but a sexualized togetherness,” says Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history and family studies at Evergreen State College. “This cult of the mutual orgasm.” For upper-class couples, marriage was social networking for important families, while the middle class thought marriage was something “you retreat into from the world.” Attitudes have shifted, but Coontz says residual resistance to different bedrooms comes from this concept of “togetherness.”

It would have bemused the likes of Christopher and Camilla.

“They would have considered it a little bit unnecessary to demonstrate you loved each other by sleeping in the same room every night,” Sykes says. “That would have been just insufferably bourgeois.”